Proper names of people

The Kalevala Proper names Tolkien transferred into The

Story of Kullervo

The Story of Kullervo

Kullervo, Kalervon poika, Kullervoinen

Kullervo, Kullervoinen Honto Taltewenlen, Kalervanpoika, Kalervonpoika, Kuli, Sākehonto, Sārihontō, Sārihonto, Hontō, Honto, Sāki, Sāke,Sāaki, Saki, Sāri Untamo, Untamoinen,

Unto

Untamo, Untamoinen Unti, Untamō the Evil, Ūlto,

Ilmarinen, Ilmari, Ilma Ilmarinen, Ilma Āsemo, Āse, the Smith Āsemo Pohjolan emäntä,

Louhi, Louhiatar, Lovetar

Louhiatar, Louhi Koi, Koi Queen of the marshlands, Koi Queen of Lōke

Kalervo, Kalervoinen Kalervo, Kalervoinen Kalervō, Kampo, Kampa, Nyelid, Keime, Kēma, Kēme, Talte, Paiväta, Saari

Table 1. Invented personal names used to replace original ones.

The first of Higgins’ categories is the largest, since it is natural to create names to replace existing ones. One of the various names for Kullervo is Honto Taltewenlen, which also appears in an alternative title for the short story: The Story of Honto Taltewenlen. Honto is one of the various bynames for Kullervo, and Talte is a byname Tolkien invented for Kalervo, Kullervo’s father. The addition -wenlen is considered a masculine patronymic suffix imitating the Finnish equivalent of -poika,

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or ‘son’. The meaning of Taltewenlen would, then, be ‘the son of Kalervo’. (Tolkien and Flieger 2017: 49.)

Tolkien also uses the forms Kalervonpoika, Kalervanpoika and Kullervo son of Kalervo when referring to Kullervo in his adaptation. Although in the Kalevala, Kullervo is introduced as ‘Kullervo, Kalervon poika’, with a space between

‘Kalervo’ and ‘poika’, the patronymic name Kalervonpoika (eng. ‘Kalervo’s son’) would also be feasible in Finnish. These proper names can be seen as having an associative function, since they give information on the relationship between Kullervo and Kalervo, and Tolkien has retained this information using both the Finnish name Kalervonpoika and its English equivalents Kullervo son of Kalervo, Sārihonto son of Kampa etc. The name Kalervanpoika is only used once in Tolkien’s short story (Tolkien and Flieger 2017: 10), and the substitution of the letter ‘o’ with the letter ‘a’ is probably a typing error.

Another byname for Kullervo is Kuli, which is merely a shortened version of Kullervo. In Qenyaqesta, the word kulu is defined as ‘gold’ and the word kulurinda as ‘orange-coloured’ (Tolkien 1998: 49). As Kullervo is described as having yellow or golden hair (e.g. Lönnrot 1984: 287; Lönnrot 1930: 78), his name might have served as inspiration for the Qenya word. Kullervo’s mother also called him kultasolki (Lönnrot 1984: 306), or a ‘golden brooch’ (Lönnrot 1930: 105). At the very end of the unfinished short story, Tolkien uses the letter ‘K’ to refer to Kullervo, although this is most likely due to the ending being a rapidly written draft of a

synopsis, where the ‘K’ is used as a convenient abbreviation.

The rest of Kullervo’s bynames are Sākehonto, Sārihontō, Sārihonto, Hontō, Honto, Sāki, Sāke, Sāaki, Saki and Sāri, of which the last one is by far the most commonly used. They all seem like variations of one and the same name, and although they cannot be connected to the source language, they are a part of Tolkien’s first Elvish language, Qenya. Sári is a proper name Tolkien uses of the sun in The Book of Lost Tales, and most of these bynames for Kullervo can be connected to the Qenya word saha or sahya, meaning ‘to be hot’ (Tolkien 1998: 81). The latter part of Sākehonto, Sārihontō and Sārihonto, -honto, also used as an independent name as seen above, is quite close to the Qenya noun hondo, meaning ‘heart’ (ibid., 40). This would suggest that Kullervo’s bynames have the semantic meaning of ‘heart of fire’, ‘fire-hearted’,

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‘hot-hearted’, or simply ‘fire’ or ‘heart’. In the Kalevala, Kullervo is depicted as quite an impulsive, hot-tempered character, which might indicate a connection between the semantic content of these proper names and the denoted object.

Sincahonda also means ‘flint-hearted’ in Qenya (Tolkien 2007: 979). Tolkien gives his own insight into the name Kullervo in The Story of Kullervo, when he writes about the unhappy mother naming her children: “—and she named the boy Kullervo, or ‘wrath’, and his daughter Wanōna, or ‘weeping’.” (Tolkien and Flieger 2017: 7).

Tolkien drew a connection between the words Kullervo and wrath, and it would therefore seem plausible that he had added a similar semantic meaning to the bynames, e.g. Sākehonto, or ‘fire-hearted’.

As seen in many of the names examined above, Tolkien often uses macrons in his constructed names. Macrons are usually used to indicate a long vowel (Oxford University Press n.d.) in natural languages. In the Qenya Lexicon (Tolkien 1998: 9–

10), however, Tolkien gives explanations for these circumflexes: ‘ā’ is pronounced slightly further back than a simple ‘a’, like in the word ‘part’, and ‘ō’ is a medium closed vowel except before the letter ‘r’, in which case it would apparently be more open, like in the word ‘ton’. Later on, we will be examining names containing letters

‘ū’, ‘ĕ’ and ‘ē’ as well, so I will briefly explain their pronunciation here. Tolkien defines the letter ‘ū’ as simply “close round” and “long close”, whereas ‘ĕ’ is an open vowel and ‘ē’ somewhat closer. Note, however, that these pronunciation guides have to do with the early version of Qenya, and there is no way of knowing whether Tolkien applied these rules already to the nomenclature he created for The Story of Kullervo, or whether they were even in existence at that point.

Of Untamo, Tolkien uses the bynames Unti, Untamō the Evil and Ūlto. These are all derived from the original name, and the epithet Untamō the Evil could be seen as a form of modification. While the proper name Untamo does not contain any semantic value indicative of wickedness in the source language, the story line does portray the character as an enemy of Kullervo’s family. In the source text, Untamo is described as “Untamo, utala miesi” (Lönnrot 1984: 280, 285), roughly translated as ‘Untamo, a cunning man’. In the Kullervo cycle he is described in this manner twice, and Kirby translated these two parts as “Untamo of hasty temper” and “the mighty

Untamoinen” (Lönnrot 1930: 69, 76). Tolkien might have constructed the epithet

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Untamō the Evil based on the Finnish source text, whilst adding a descriptive function to it to reinforce Untamo’s role as a villain. The word untamo became a noun in Qenya as well, meaning ‘enemy’ (Garth 2014: 28).

For the smith Ilmarinen, Tolkien created the proper name Āsemo, also calling him Āse and the Smith Āsemo. Flieger (2017: 55—56) suggests that Tolkien used the Finnish noun ase, meaning ‘weapon’ or ‘tool’, as a base for the proper name. As mentioned before, the letter ‘ā’ is pronounced similarly to the vowel in the word

‘part’, which is how the first letter in the Finnish word ase is pronounced as well.

The suffix -mo is defined as an agent suffix: an ending that identifies an entity performing an action (ibid.). This would render the meaning of the smith’s name something along the lines of ‘tool user’ or ‘weapon user’.

The mother of Ilmarinen’s wife is a central figure in the Kalevala, but in the Kullervo cycle she is merely mentioned on a few occasions. In his notes, Tolkien lists Louhiatar as the name of the Smith’s wife, not his mother-in-law, but in the story itself he uses proper names Louhi, Koi, Koi Queen of the marshlands and Koi Queen of Lōke consistently of her. Koi is a Finnish common noun, meaning ‘dawn’

or ‘daybreak’, and it is not related to the source text proper name Louhi semantically or morphologically. In the Kalevala, Louhi is depicted as a powerful sorcerer, who has the power to control the movements of the sun and the moon among other things (Lönnrot 1984: 368, 416). There is no way of knowing whether Tolkien was aware of Louhi’s powers, but it is possible that the meaning of the proper name Koi lies in her ability to command the sun to rise.

Louhi is the ruler of a mythical place called Pohjola or Pohja, a dark and gloomy region in the North. The epithet Koi Queen of the marshlands would, then, give additional information about the land she rules, although Tolkien does call Finland, or Sutse/Sutsi, a ‘marshland’ as well. A comparison has also been drawn between the names Louhi and Loki (Turunen 1979: 185), the latter being the name of a god in Norse mythology. This is a connection Tolkien possibly made himself when constructing the name Queen of Lōke. Both Louhi and Loki are depicted as

somewhat malicious deities in their respective epics which might have inspired the construction of the Qenya word lōme, or ‘dusk, gloom, darkness’ and lōmear, or

‘child of gloom’ (Tolkien 1998: 55).

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Of Kalervo, the father of Kullervo, Tolkien used quite many different names:

Kalervō, Kampo, Kampa, Nyelid, Keime, Kēma, Kēme, Talte, Paiväta and Saari. A hint of naturalisation might be seen in Kalervō and other names examined above with the same macron. Tolkien hasn’t adapted these names into the phonological

conventions of English, but it is possible that these names have been altered to fit Qenya phonology. The bynames Kampo and Kampa are used interchangeably in The Story of Kullervo. These names do not seem to bear any semantic information, but Kampa is later used in Tolkien’s book The Silmarillion, published originally in 1977, as a name for one of Tolkien’s earliest characters, Eärendil, with the meaning

‘leaper’. (Tolkien and Flieger 2017: xxii.)

The name Nyelid is not related to Finnish morphologically or semantically, and it seems that this was a product of Tolkien’s own imagination. According to Flieger (2017: 60), the proper name might mean something like ‘of the clan of’ but she also draws attention to the root NYEL-, with which words meaning ‘ring, sing, give out a sweet sound’ are formed in some of Tolkien’s Elvish languages. Christopher

Tolkien, however, writes about a similar word Nielíqui in connection with Nyelid, which has been derived from the root NYEHE-, meaning ‘to weep’ (Tolkien, J and Tolkien, C 1983: 262).

Talte, Paiväta and Saari are all proper names used of Kullervo only in Tolkien’s notes. They do not appear in the short story itself, with the exception of Talte being used as part of Kullervo’s name, Honto Taltewenlen, discussed in the first paragraph.

The name Talte can’t be connected to the source text or the source language per se, but Garth (2014: 40) does suggest a connection to the Qenya word talta, or ‘to lade, burden, load, charge, oppress, weigh down’. There might be some truth to it, but it is impossible to say for sure, since there are many other similar words in Qenya, like talde, ‘to cover’ and talta, ‘shaky, wobbly’ (Tolkien 1998: 93).

The latter two proper names resemble Finnish quite closely. Saari stands for ‘an island’ and it is also used both as a place name, Saari, and as a proper name, Saarelainen, in the Kalevala, although not in the Kullervo cycle (see e.g. Lönnrot 1984: 82–87). Paiväta, on the other hand, is not a direct loan from Finnish, but it does look similar to the word päivä, which in modern Finnish is almost exclusively used as ‘day’. In the Kalevala, Päivä is often also used in reference of the sun,

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Päivälä when talking of his dwelling place and Päivän poika, or ‘the son of Sun’, when he is personified. There is also a goddess of the sun called Päivätär, which resembles Tolkien’s Paiväta quite closely (see e.g. Lönnrot 1984: 82, 210; Turunen 1979: 269–270.) The word päivä, with the meaning of ‘day’, is also used in the Kullervo cycle (see e.g. Lönnrot 1984: 280–281, 283–284).